Cactus Juice

Theologians in a muddy soup: How are Christians to appreciate religious diversity?

I've lately been reading Chesterton, Bonhoeffer and Ellul, and they all in various ways take the view that Christianity requires an appreciation of opposites, particularly in the issue of religion. In these dark days, I appreciate this sunny view that Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and all other faiths require our appreciation.  The vile blogs I visited looking at how this issues is discussed further highlighted the unusual Christian goodness of this argument amongst, *cough*, Christians.

The argument can be further explained by pointing out that without these options, Christianity has no definition.  Frankly, it strikes me as a little sad (okay, yes, I am also generally disgusted as well) how many supposed adherents of the Christian sects themselves have lost their identities and merged back into a muddly goop of Oprah-esque affirmations.  Without options, nothing has definition, and Christianity enshrines this in the requirement of choice.   Yet, as cheerful and good spirited as this appreciation is, I'm not sure how it can be defined.

To consider this problem, let us look at two extremes that I would say are errors. The first extreme labels any alternative from Christianity evil. This was carefully explained to me by an elderly lady who considered her bigotry most proper. Anything that is not Christian, she explained, is wrong. And since everyone has the ability to know right, it is not only wrong, but a lie. Consequently, every effort must be made to limit the speech of, and perhaps even the existence of, Muslims (if I had this conversation to do over, I would have questioned her on why she selected Muslims vs. the more historically popular target of Christian bigotry, instead my jaw just sort of hung open) so that their lies cannot be spread. This conversation occurred several years ago, but a prominent pastor in the news has recently stirred up the topic (good post on the Classical Values blog).  This view is easy to identify and abhor in the extreme, and so I've seen a lot of people try to start with the delicate suggestion that people of other faiths are just misguided.  However, once you start down that road you have no where else to go. (This is one of those very common situations where those who claim to be moderate are in fact merely setting up the logical basis for the extreme.)

The other extreme labels all faiths part of one big tent. This argument states that the only difference between the faiths is semantics. This extreme discredits every faith equally... all are misguided.  Unlike the other extreme which first presents in bigotry, this extreme first presents as if it were acceptance. But eventually the demands that people of faith give up all meaning is made known and this extreme is revealed to be just as bigoted as the first.  Searching around the internet for more on this topic, the discussion of it is indeed vile, but the backlash is more than justified.

An argument with which I have more sympathy is that everyone has a role to play, and those roles are not the same.  Only God has the ability to judge the righteous commitment to that role.  This argument points out that we do not even know what was happening with Judas, who certainly had to play his role, and therefore we have no basis to make an immortal judgment.   I like this argument very much as it reflects the message of Christ particularly well.  However it also suggest that we live in a purposefully confused and muddled world.  This is more difficult for a monotheist to accept, though at the end of the day I still prefer this view because, thought it can be used to justify particular evils, it does not support a systematically evil philosophy.

So what of it? Can a sunny appreciation for religious diversity be justified for Christians?  Do you know anyone who makes this argument particularly well?  Whether it can or not, it certainly feels more right than being entangled in the evils of the extreme views.  Perhaps this is one of the many things where a happy middle exists without a good definition.

A little bit down.

Went to bed last night with the news that a North Carolina jury has convicted a man on the flimsiest of evidence and woke up to the news that we've assassinated a US citizen.  That's just 12 hours worth of bad news, piled onto horror after horror that came before.  It feels like unusually horrific times and I am left asking if something in the world has changed?  Or is that something has changed in me?

When I wrote my 9/11 post, I thought about that when I was a child I had no thought that someday I might be investigated for my magazine subscriptions and my despair was over the fact that my niece and nephew don't have that same security.  But of course people have been investigated for their magazine subscriptions for a long time, just not people like me.  Disturbingly unlikeable men and black men have been convicted with no evidence well before my time.  And it surely ain't the first assassination of a citizen enacted by the United States government.

For every horror of the current day, there is a past horror that surpasses it.  One of the differences is that the horrors are fed through the internet firehose directly into my brain.  My iPad makes the world yet more horrible, and yet so amazing that I could never turn it off.  I was just reading in Ellul that "every moment of a man's life is not historic but apocalyptic." (The Presence of the Kingdom)  The good of Christ draws you through the horrors of the world; the more good, the more horrors.  It cannot be avoided.

And in the internet age one is drawn to interact with horror in a way one could have avoided before.  Bonhoeffer, not long before his death, took a three hour hike through war torn Europe without seeing another person and without knowing when the ferry he was awaiting would arrive (no app for that).  Few were more fully engaged in the horror of his time, and yet he had a space that is hardly imaginable to someone like me, far less engaged but still standing before the firehose.  The evils on the internet: are they new, or is it just that every evil voice now has a megaphone?  Earlier from the Ellul:

More than ever, every person is involved in the life of the world, and the world is more penetrating, more crushing, more exacting, than it has ever been.
...
A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.  Everyone bears the consequences of the faults of others.

And you have your own megaphone, so are you continually called upon to respond?  Shortly after the previous quote ends, Ellul adds distressingly, "Modern man can no longer have confidence in the virtues of the individual..."  Most people understand this distress.  You've surely seen this comic before:

 

All these parts of modern life invite comment in a way they didn't before.  You don't get to have ignorance of government assassination, you don't read about a strange conviction in a history book, you don't assume weird laws are going to let you off for being white (okay, after 9/11 I actually did assume that and I was actually surprised to have my mail investigated, as naive as that may have been).  Everything is in real time, with enough time to write your congressman and expect him to hear you.  Does that mean you have to write your congressman?  Or can you just put Amnesty International on automatic deduction and call it a day?

Last night I finished reading Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer and I was certain the answer allowed respite from a moral imperative for what would turn out to be a daily stack of correspondence, and felt very free that I could feel certain from Bonhoeffer of all people that it was okay not to be so seriously engaged.  And if Bonhoeffer was engaged in trying to kill Hitler, I could survive in a world that isn't quite Nazi.  Bonhoeffer stated something about how anything so serious actually couldn't be serious at all.  It certainly couldn't be Christian, both Bonhoeffer and Ellul are clear on that.

On the other hand I am told that Metaxas' book molds Bonhoeffer into a modern evangelical ideal, and surely that ideal would be to be idealistically unengaged (contrary to Bonhoeffer's meaning and contrary to Ellul's teaching above), and that I should have read one of the other biographies instead. (Though Metaxas is surely the most readable, so unless you are very academically minded, I would go for Metaxas and just be aware that it means to idealize in a certain way... he is a children's Christian writer after all.)

And I would suggest reading Bonhoeffer (or Ellul, but Ellul is a little more lost... if one needs direction go for Bonhoeffer).  The biography contained long quotes, and Ethics is available electronically and I've picked that up.  After a little Bonhoeffer I am left feeling that despite everything I have been exposed to about what a good idea it is to be a Christian, no one before has ever given me an actual good idea for it.  Bonhoeffer makes the theology of Christianity meaningful in a way I haven't before had the opportunity to feel and believe simultaneously.  So I shall resolve to engage a little more carefully and be a little less down.

------

After writing this, found this article claiming that human violence is on a long-term (thousands of years) decline.

Can you still be an American if you lose weight?

There's an old joke that that the Japanese eat little fat, the French eat lots of fat; Indians drink almost no red wine, the Spanish drink lots of wine, yet their heart attack rate is less than in the United Status.  Conclusion? What kills you is speaking English.  It's been turned into a YouTube commercial for French language school.  The Mayo Clinic has validated it and a linguist has deconstructed that validation.  (Image: Potato eating contest.  As American as apple pie!)

This week, new evidence published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The article, "Changes in Diet and Lifestyle in and Long-term Weight Gain in Women and Men" (limited preview available), followed more than 120,000 men and women from 1986 to 2006 and ranked the diet and lifestyle datapoints associated with weight gain and loss.  Agendas on all sides have been rankled by the findings and the authors note that many of the associations are not that strong (although when you look at their chart, the fries pop out big time).  At the end of the day the most significant finding is the one that the study presupposed: As a group, the study subjects got fatter and fatter.

Per the article, "Whereas weight change associated with any single lifestyle factor were relatively modest in our three cohorts, in the aggregate changes to diet and physical activity accounted for the largest differences in weight gain."*  In other words, the simplest outcome of the study isn't that a particular food or lifestyle factor affects weight, but that Americans are getting fatter all the time.

I've said before that losing weight is positively un-American.  There are a host of other social and economic factors that come into play, and for the most part I'd rather leave those to the playground of the policy wonks and conspiracy theorists.  The study also noted that TV watching itself is not responsible for the weight gain, but promotes behaviors associated with weight gain.  Every day we face a culture that promotes weight gain and obesity.  The individual costs in terms of health expenditure, job discrimination and inability to work are clear, but the individual benefits in terms of social cohesion and purchaser reward should be just as clear.  The benefits to being fat and the ties that bind us into obesity are strong: how else would more than half our population be motivated to commit group suicide?

Forming a different tribe is part of the answer; trends away from obesity are contagious.  Weight Watchers helped me lose a large amount of weight, mainly because for the first time I met people who had done so.  These people are rare: you might see them in the paper, but a chance to speak to one day after day after day is less common.  A string of ailments left me feeling a little hopeless again, but still I've got my tribe: Someone I know has recently lost 40 pounds.  The boyfriend has lost enough weight for his coworkers to notice.  Another friend has kept her weight off for more than five years.  These people, including the policy wonks and conspiracy theorists (God bless em!), are the people who bring individuals back from the brink.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.
-Matthew 10:34-38^

-----

*One fascinating surmisal of the study authors is that the benefits of behaviors associated with weight loss may be underestimated in longitudinal studies because people who have gained weight in the study interum period or who are responding preemptively to a tendency to gain weight may engage in more behaviors to control weight.  In other words, the people who most need to eat vegetables or hit the gym to control their weight are the people doing so, therefore behaviors which are in fact beneficial nonetheless show up as things fat people do.

^My priest spoke well on this passage Sunday.  It is one that every good Ellul-reading conspiracy theorist should know.

400 Years of the King James Bible

I read the King James as my primary translation because of its beauty, but also because of the distance from the events of the day.  Given the war news and dramatic emotiveness of this very day, the anniversary will not be noted as much as the media was gearing up for yesterday.

Four hundreed years ago, people fought and died, wrote secret letters, formed secret societies, and were secretly arrested and secreted away by governments over the issue of how to translate the Bible.  Yet today, it is the quiet gentle place where few can find discord.

Translation of the Bible is always a political act. King James Version was created under political leadership as a response to political issues in the translations available at that time.  The text itself is colored by political viewpoints going back thousands of years, but those viewpoints end when the book came of the printer 400 years ago today.  Given that timeframe, many of the political views are either bald or easily identified once they are pointed out.

In contrast, current translations contain politics which tend to be invisble to me.  I may be too closely allied with the intentions of the translator.  Sometimes such specific issues of viewpoint are at stake that I do not fully understand how my thinking is meant to be manipulated by the word choice even after it is pointed out.  These new translations have to viewed with the same caution that we analyze the newspapers on this historic day.  In contrast, after 400 years of settling down, the King James Version is almost (but never completely) a place of rest.